Blinding Flash of the Obvious

In my reading (and thinking) about human organization, I fell into Robert Nisbet’s Twilight of Authority. Allow me to quote from it:

Of all the social or moral objectives, however, which are the taking-off points of the new despotism in our time, there is one that stands out clearly, that has the widest possible appeal, and that at the present time undoubtedly represents the greatest single threat to liberty and social initiative. I refer to equality, or more accurately to the New Equality.

Now, do you suppose that Nisbet wrote this some time in the last decade, given the obsession with equality-cum-equity that has become ascendant in that time? It would be reasonable to assume so; it would also be erroneous. This book was published in 1975. Nisbet then proceeds to offer a quote from another author that makes the point even more cogently.

“The foremost or indeed the sole condition required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community is to love equality or to get men to believe you love it. Thus, the science of despotism, which was once so complex, has been simplified and reduced, as it were, to a single principle.”

This internal quote is from Tocqueville’s Democracy in America - now close to two hundred years old. Quoting Nisbet again:

Tocqueville yielded to no one in his appreciation of equality before the law and equality of opportunity. Each of these, he thought, was vital to a creative society and a free state. It was Tocqueville’s genius, however, to see the large possibility of the growth in the national state of another kind of equality, more akin to the kind of leveling that war and centralization bring to a social order. It is only in our time that his words have become analytic and descriptive rather than prophetic.

This all comes in the context of militarism as a style of authority (in a time of the decline in other forms/styles of authority). We have all heard in the last few years of the need for unity, for the moral equivalent of war, of how wonderful it all was when we had a clear and common enemy (and this almost always harking back to World War II). And in this New Equality, the proponents of it are less interested in the qualifiers of “before the law” or “opportunity” - this is all about equality of result. I remind your dear reader, this was his observation almost 50 years ago. So instead of wondering how we got to where we are - marvel that it has taken that long to become obvious to us.

Lorenzo Warby is writing a wonderful accounting of the social dynamics behind this movement for the New Equality over at Not On Your Team, But Always Fair - a series titled Worshiping the Future. One argument I’ve been making is that though this is illiberal, this isn’t as anti-Enlightenment as may be assumed. In fact, it can be viewed as the culmination - the inevitable endpoint - of the Enlightenment and the values thereof. This partially depends on how on you view Rousseau (and Hegel). Absolutely, when you come to Nietzsche - the values are the ones that he argued must be subject to revaluation.

Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal” - which was revolutionary rhetoric but rooted in the limited sense of equality before the law. Of course it doesn’t say that, nor does it say equal in opportunity. We’ve always supplied that context to the phrase, but it can just as easily be employed to mean literally equal. In the theological justification, we are all equal in God’s eyes. We may have abandoned the forms of the old religion, but not all of the values and the new religion usurps those. That is part of the groundwork for the New Equality. Jefferson also laid the blame for tyrannical acts of Parliament on George III; it was much better PR. And I think we are now paying for that soaring (but limited) meaning now being construed in a terrible way as part of his slightly too-clever rhetoric.

A tonic for that cleverness is found in Franklin, as I’ve previously written. Near the end of the Constitutional Convention, he addressed his position thus:

I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, and can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.

A blinding flash of the obvious indeed. Why do we have the choice of two decrepit, corrupt old men in this year’s presidential election? It is the choice that is appropriate to this electorate. Save democracy? What a farce.